Daisy Hernandez has been a credit cards editor at The Points Guy since 2023, but has taken joy in gamifying credit card rewards for much longer. Like many of her colleagues, she spreads her spending across multiple cards to maximize rewards such as airline miles, hotel points and cash back.
In January 2024, she opened a Chase Sapphire Reserve card and soon earned a 60,000-point bonus for spending at least $4,000 within the first three months. As she continued to rack up points, Hernandez began chatting with her mom about recreating a previous mother-daughter trip to Iceland.
When her grandmother, then 79, got in on the conversation, Hernandez knew she wanted to put some points to use.
“She had stars in her eyes. She was like, ‘That’s amazing. It sounds incredible,'” Hernandez says. “I thought, ‘Let me see what I can do.'”
By May, she’d accumulated more than 100,000 points, which she put toward a trip for all three of them. By The Points Guy’s estimates, each Chase Ultimate Rewards point is worth roughly 2.05 cents, making her stash worth just over $2,000.
Altogether, she was able to cover accommodations, a rental car and her own airfare. With those savings, she could afford to pay out-of-pocket for the other two flights.
“For my grandma, it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip,” Hernandez says.
Here’s how she did it.
She chose a card strategically
Hernandez wanted a premium travel card and narrowed things down to two main options. To choose between them she looked at rewards points and transfer partners, among other factors.
The Chase card worked with her “favorite hotel chain,” it turned out. So she realized, “this is kind of a no-brainer.” Especially because the first card wooed consumers with airport lounge perks that wouldn’t be available to her at her local airport.
For cardholders willing to pay an annual fee, several travel cards offer excellent perks and generous introductory bonus offers. By shifting the bulk of her spending onto her new Chase card, Hernandez was able to eclipse the $4,000 three-month spending threshold to earn the card’s 60,000-point bonus.
She was wise with her rewards
Hernandez’s card offers a baseline one point for every dollar spent on the card and three points on travel and dining, plus increased values for purchases made through the Chase travel portal. Over the course of about five months, she was able to rack up just over 100,000 points.
Importantly, Hernandez was responsible with her spending and aware of the risks of opening a new card. She and other experts would tell you not to open a card unless you can use it responsibly and to avoid going into debt to pursue rewards.
Hernandez used some 23,000 points — about $470 by TPG’s estimates — to rent a car for four days. She used around the same amount to book her flight, which came with a face value of roughly $450. She cashed in the remainder on three nights for three guests spread across two properties she booked through the Chase travel portal.
Her 100,000 points didn’t cover everything. She still paid roughly $900 for her mother and grandmother’s flights, plus whatever she spent on dining and activities once she was there.
“I still got killer value out of a trip for three people,” Hernandez says.
She didn’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Credit card point obsessive that she is, Hernandez says she could have gotten even more bang for her buck were she more opportunistic with her points.
“If I had worked harder to maximize with transfer bonuses, if any had been available, which they weren’t at the time that I booked us, I probably could have even gotten more value from those points,” she says.
Credit cards’ partner rewards programs periodically offer incentives to transfer your points over. Had Hernandez waited for a hotel chain to offer a 50% transfer bonus, for instance, she could have converted, say, 50,000 of her credit card points into 75,000 hotel points.
But getting the maximum value out of your points requires effort and flexibility. Transfer bonuses only come up every so often. And even if you manage to find a lucrative one, there’s no telling if good deals will be available when you want to travel.
“During peak season, it’s going to be more expensive, whether it’s cash or points. So you’re at the mercy of when you decide to travel and where you’re going,” Hernandez says.
Plus, if you let your points sit while you wait to find the perfect deal, they can lose some of their value. “Devaluations happen all the time. [A hotel chain] could say, ‘Instead of our points being worth 0.8 cents per point, now it’s 0.65,'” Hernandez warns.
Which is all to say that Hernandez has no regrets about using her points when she did.
“We’re from Central America. My grandma had never been anywhere close to a Nordic country. She said, ‘Never, in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that I would have seen a place like Iceland,'” Hernandez says. “That was the cherry on top for me to be able to experience that with her and my mom.”
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